the guillotine blade that killed Marie Antoinette

This is the guillotine blade that killed Marie Antoinette

What you may have been told

This sinister-looking, sharp-pointed blade attached to a dark lump of what appears to be burned wood with bolts and handles is the one that killed Marie Antoinette. It was on display at Madame Tussauds waxworks museum for many years. Underneath it, a small sign claimed: This guillotine blade is the one that beheaded Marie Antoinette in 1793. It was purchased from the executioner’s family?

The debunking

Although most people know very little about Marie Antoinette, they can’t help but be fascinated by her, especially by her gruesome death. People haven’t been executed by guillotine since 1977 (yes really, that recently) but we can’t seem to forget the execution device. It’s a pretty macabre scene – the condemned walking up the steps, the lever, the swift drop of the blade, the idea that the head may still show some signs of life… it speaks to the dark side of our imaginations – the scene that is, not the head.

Marie Antoinette lost her head on 16 October 1793. Henri Sanson was the executioner who pulled the lever. Henri came from a family of executioners and followed his father into the profession. His son, Henry-Clément Sanson, would later follow him. The Sansons often had curious visitors who wanted to learn more about the dreadful family business, and for a fee they could see a demonstration of the guillotine using straw dolls or, for a little extra, a living sheep. Apparently English tourists were especially interested and lined up to see his home exhibit.

The family needed the money as Henri had a gambling habit, was haunted by creditors, spent some time in a debtors’ prison and even pawned two of the guillotines in his possession. He was fired as official state executioner in 1847 and the official guillotine was confiscated by the government, but he still owned one. This he sold to Joseph Tussaud in 1854, after Joseph also paid to have it released from the pawnshop.

So far so good. But where things get iffy is that there are several claims about what happened to the blade.

In his book Choses Vues (Things Seen’) the famous writer Victor Hugo (the one who wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) claimed to have met the former assistant to the Paris executioner, who told Mr Hugo about the Sanson family, how their house was decorated and how Mr Sanson entertained guests. He also shared an anecdote of an English family who were shown the guillotine but who had a daughter who expected more than just a demonstration of the blade cutting through some trusses of hay. She insisted she was” put in the oven’ tying up a victim and placing them under the blade was called.
Her parents didn’t object, so her legs and arms were tied up and she was strapped to the so-called swinging plank. She even insisted her head was placed in the neck-piece. Much to the assistant’s relief, she was finally satisfied and did not demand that the blade be dropped. Guests like these always wanted to see the blade that cut the king and queen’s heads off. But according to this former assistant, the blade had been sold for old iron, in the same way as all the other guillotine knives when they are worn out’. And Hugo writes: If he had cared to trade in them, there would have been as many knives of Louis XVI sold as walking-sticks of Voltaire’, another popular souvenir of the time.
Countless of them were sold even though there were, of course, only a few genuine ones.

Another theory claims that the entire guillotine somehow ended up on a rock overlooking a penal settlement in French Guiana called Devil’s Island. The guillotine there was often one of the first things new prisoners saw upon arrival, a subtle reminder of what awaited them if they broke the rules.

There are a lot of peculiar circumstances surrounding this Tussauds guillotine blade. The fact is that there were thousands of guillotine blades used during the French Revolution and after it, and even if Sanson did once own the genuine blade that killed the royals, it seems he didn’t treat the objects in his collection very well, pawning them and letting people try them out. We know Sanson had serious financial problems and the blade used for famous victims would be worth more than a random blade, if, as the anonymous man Victor Hugo spoke to claimed, it had indeed been sold for scrap.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Tussauds was sometimes a little economical with the truth, embellishing some of the stories surrounding its exhibits and Madame herself. For example, in her memoirs, Marie Tussaud, the French waxwork artist and founder of the original Tussauds collection, never mentions being forced to make moulds of the king and queen, but later it was claimed that she somehow managed to model the royal heads before they were buried under quicklime. The quicklime was part of a top-secret operation to make sure there wouldn’t be enough left of them to be turned into relics. The Tussaud family has always insisted that Marie was forced to make the death masks, despite the fact that the authorities were at the time desperately trying to erase every trace of the royals and were suspicious of Marie herself, as she had once been a member of the royal household as a tutor.
So much of the story is suspicious that there’s no way anyone can claim the blade was used for anyone in particular. Even Madame Tussauds museum now agrees with that. They admit on their website that they have no solid evidence of its connection to the “let them eat cake” queen’s death’.

Source ~ ‘Fake History 101 things that never happened’ by Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse